North Korea urgently needs medical aid to treat victims of its huge train blast, UN officials said on Monday after aid workers described children writhing in pain, their blackened faces stitched with twine.
But the secretive communist state shut down one route to quick relief when North Korean officials told South Korea they did not want direct overland shipments. Seoul agreed to hold more talks on Tuesday and will send some goods by sea, officials said.
UN officials in the North Korean capital said Chinese aid was reaching the town of Ryongchon, where at least 161 people were killed and hundreds injured in Thursday's blast.
"A lot of assistance is needed very urgently," said Gerald Bourke, spokesman for the World Food Programme in North Korea.
"At the hospital, they are overwhelmed. They have very little in the way of equipment and the necessary drugs and medicines," he said by telephone. "So there is a big need there."
Brendan McDonald, head of the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Pyongyang, said the blast had put Ryongchon's hospital out of action.
"That's a hospital that services the needs of the whole county's 123,000 people," he said.
North Korea's official KCNA news agency said government bodies had sent aid and officials were "striving to heal the damage".
KCNA also told the North Korean people for the first time that at least 150 people had been killed and others were still missing.But KCNA devoted more space to evening galas marking army foundation day on Sunday.
Ministers and top army and party officials watched an acrobatic show in Pyongyang, it said.
The death toll could rise above 161 as ill-equipped hospitals in the impoverished North battled to save the lives of hundreds suffering from serious burns, Sweden's envoy said.
Scores of primary school children were among those killed when the two trains exploded, obliterating a school and large parts of the border town. Aid workers who visited victims at nearby Sinuiju Provincial Hospital described great suffering.
International agencies had relief operations under control, said Swedish ambassador Paul Beijer. But he said he feared the death toll could rise with hundreds of burn victims suffering in crude hospitals with minimal supplies.
"I believe it might get much higher. There are still some 300 seriously wounded people in hospital," he told Reuters in Stockholm by telephone from Pyongyang.
The Red Cross launched an emergency appeal to raise $1.21 million to buy food, clothing and cooking fuel for up to 10,000 people affected by the blast,
"Thousands of people have lost most or all of what they had and they were already struggling. They must be given a chance to recover and that requires sustained assistance," Niels Juel, regional relief co-ordinator for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said in a statement.
The blast took place just hours after North Korean leader Kim Jong-il's train passed through Ryongchon on his way back from China. He is widely reported to fear flying, and his rail routes are heavily guarded, often with traffic halted for hours.
"We saw children rolling and moaning in pain, many with a lot of cuts to the face and rudimentary twine stitching," World Food Programme Asia regional director Tony Banbury said by telephone.
"Some of the kids had lost sight in both eyes. Two were laid out on cabinets. Several mothers had climbed into the beds of their wounded children," he said from Pyongyang on Sunday.
Faces of many of the injured were blackened by burns or lacerated by rubble and dust blown into the air.
The first outside help arrived on Sunday from China, the North's giant neighbour and closest ally. South Korea decided to send goods worth $1 million as soon as possible and Japan announced plans to contribute $100,000 worth of relief supplies.
Officials of the two Koreas were to meet on Tuesday in the North Korean border city of Kaesong after North Korea said it preferred receiving aid by sea to overland shipments, a Seoul official said. The South's Red Cross said goods would leave by boat on Thursday, making the 15-hour trip from Inchon to Nampo.
North Korea's first official report on the disaster blamed the incident on carelessness during the shunting of wagons loaded with ammonium nitrate fertiliser and fuel tanker wagons.
Seoul has said the blast was probably an accident resulting from a train backlog rather than a botched attempt on Kim's life.
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